“You come first of all!”
“That’s flattering,” she smiled. “What about Nasmyth?”
“An unusually fine man, but he has his limits. You have none.”
“I’m not sure I quite understand you.”
“Then,” he explained seriously, “what I think I mean is this—you’re one of the people who somehow contrive to meet any call that is made on them. You would never sit down, helpless, in a trying situation; you’d find some way of getting over the difficulties. It’s a gift more useful than genius.”
“You’re rating me too highly,” she answered with some embarrassment. “You admitted that you thought my place was here—the inference was that I shouldn’t fit into a different one.”
“No,” he corrected her; “you’d adapt yourself to changed conditions; but that wouldn’t prevent your suffering in the process. Indeed, I think people of your kind often suffer more than the others.”
He was to some extent correct in his estimate of her, but she shrank from the direct personal application of his remarks.
“Aren’t the virtues you have described fairly common?” she asked. “I think that must be so, because they’re so necessary.”
“In a degree, I suppose they are. You see them, perhaps, most clearly in such lands as mine. The pioneer has a good deal against him—frost and floods, hard rock and sliding snow; he must face every discomfort, hunger and stinging cold. The prospector crawls through tangled forests, and packs his stores across snowy divides; shallow shafts cave in, rude dams are swept away. A man worked to exhaustion on the trail runs out of provisions and goes on, starving; he lames himself among the rocks, sets his teeth and limps ahead. I’ve thought the capacity to do so is humanity’s greatest attribute, but after all it’s not shown in its finest light battling with material things. When the moral stress comes, the man who would face the other often fails.”